Theorizing Connectivity: Modernism and the Network Narrative

Abstract

The network narrative, as a genre, is a young phenomenon – at least insofar as it has
only recently received scholarly attention. The predominant scholarship on the genre takes
its cues from two recent narrative trends: the six-degrees-of-separation films like those
that rose to prominence as major studio releases in the middle of the 2000s – e.g. Crash and Syriana (2005), Babel (2006)[1] – and hypertextual narratives of digital
environments.[2] But these modes of examination confine
the genre both to a narrow investigation of form and to a period that cannot reach much
earlier than the 1990s. It is, if we read this genealogy of criticism correctly, as if the
network narrative genre – and, one might infer, the figure of the network itself – had
spawned autochthonously somewhere within the last twenty or thirty years.

Drawing together studies of Sherwood Anderson, the collective novel, John Dos Passos, and
Gertrude Stein, this cluster of essays seeks to locate the origins of the network
narrative in the period of modernism, and particularly in that aesthetic movement’s
manifestation in American literature. These essays challenge traditional scholarship on
American modernism by situating the network as an alternative to tropes of fragment and
totality – not only mediating that dialectical tension, but also providing the moderns a
figure by which to represent their complex milieu. The goals of this collection are
therefore twofold. First, we want to challenge the conventional limitations of the genre’s
form and period by demonstrating the widespread use of both formal and diegetic networked
dynamics in modernist American fiction. Second, by taking these literary formulations as
markers of intellectual history, we want to argue that the moderns’ network thinking
originated with a set of material conditions that contributed as substantially to the rise
of network theory as would those of the digital revolution. In other words, the network
narrative genre and the widespread ideology of networks that we recognize today are not
the exclusive domain of a digitized society, but they are also part of a trajectory that
reaches back into the earliest decades of the twentieth century.

The genealogy of network thinking extends beyond the birth of digitized society, most
notably in the pre-digital poststructuralist effort to theorize non-hierarchical modes of
representational and political connectivity. One has only to look at the theoretical
grounding of network narrative discourse and criticism in the early 1990s to see that the
models of connectivity most influential to the burgeoning field of hypertext studies were
derived from mid-century critical theorists. While their work animates different archives,
they share a commitment to non-linear, horizontal, multi-centered modes of communication
and agency in literature, historiography, and knowledge production. Indeed, it would be an
understatement to say that critics like Stuart Moulthroup and George P. Landow relied on
poststructuralist concepts like Kristeva’s "intertextuality" and Deleuze and
Guattari’s "rhizome" and "nomad thought" to articulate hypertext theory.

But while Landow et al. have often been praised for the prescient connections they made
between contemporary poststructuralist thought and the young field of hypertext, less
conspicuous has been the way in which hypertext theory, in the process of adapting
literary and cultural theory, elided the non-formal aspects of the poststructuralist
interest in horizontal modes of connectivity. For instance, in the introduction to his
watershed collection, Hyper/Text/Theory (1994), Landow plays
down the political context of poststructuralism, explaining that both its concepts and the
idea of hypertextuality grew "out of dissatisfaction with the
related phenomena of the printed book and hierarchical thought"
[Landow 1994, 1]. Thus, he writes, "even thinkers like Hélène Cixous, who seem resolutely opposed to technology, can call
for ideas, such as l’ecriture feminine,
that appear to find their instantiation in this new information technology"
[Landow 1994, 1].

Landow’s new-media-friendly Cixous suggests that the digital network constitutes
(unbeknownst to the poststructuralists) the culmination of much poststructuralist thought,
rather than merely a productive model for the new forms of connectivity theorized by
poststructuralists in aid of articulating feminist and postcolonial forms of agency. The
problem we find here is not in associating hypertext with "intertext"
or ecriture; it is in omitting the point that Cixous’s objection to
technology was to its alignment with masculinist and dehumanizing practices in the
production of knowledge. What we mean to emphasize here is that the apparatus of the
digital network became a fortuitous, but certainly not teleologically necessary or even
preferred, figure of the modes of connectivity being worked out by mid-century thinkers
trying to theorize non-hierarchical agency. Conceding this point helps turn our gaze
toward conditions conducive to network thinking that existed well before the digital
movement.

Indeed, when it comes to the question of where theories of network narratives and
hypertext came from, criticism has been slightly amnesiac. While electronic computer
circuitry and hyperlinked texts represent the most fully-fledged expressions of the
network, the conditions for network thinking extend not only into the theoretical
revolutions of poststructuralism, but also into the social structures and lived cultures
of the modernists. Poststructuralists and postmodernists seeking modes of knowledge
production and interpretation immune to totalizing "master" narratives
and hierarchical frameworks of power were responding to situations first recognized (even
if not fully resolved) by experimental modernist writers. Michael Bell has tried to
reconcile the sometimes problematic similarities between formulations of postmodernism and
modernism by arguing that while "a new cultural movement and new
forms of artistic expression have undoubtedly come into being [….] they are inevitably
still working out the inner possibilities of the earlier period"
[Bell 2002, 10].

These "inner possibilities," which the modernists only partly unpacked
in their experimental forms of artistic expression, reflect a new territory of human
connection and knowledge shaped, in turn, by changing social, economic, demographic, and
technological situations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. New practical and
ideological environments made it necessary to rethink human connectivity. Marconi’s famous
1901 wireless broadcast, for instance, confirmed the imminence of global wireless
communication. The suffrage of women, first in Great Britain and then in the United States
during the teens and twenties, altered the political demographics of both a declining and
an emergent empire. Similarly, increased mobility and urbanization altered the face of
both of these nations, bringing over twenty million European immigrants, many of them
non-Protestant people of color, to the United States. Indeed, the city became a powerful
modernist trope for the need to re-conceptualize the parameters of community, often along
the lines of cultural pluralism and regionalism – ideational formations that today we
might consider proto-network thinking. Following World War I, moreover, destabilization of
global trade rendered a new world economic order an exigency, which could not,
unfortunately, be addressed adequately without recourse to another world war.

These contexts and others suggest a nascent ideology taking hold in the imagination of
social space, and given the prevalence of the network as a model of social organization
today, we can look backward to see how that organizational figure was developing during
the modern period. It is not simply that the network produces an easy form of coherence
out of the chaotic disaggregation felt by many in the period. Rather, the network performs
an important mediation of the period’s impulses toward totalization and dispersal, unity
and fragmentation that typify the period’s tensions in, for example, the U.S.’s changing
demographic makeup – impulses that were so endemic that they may well be understood as
constituting the very cultural logic of modernism. And in negotiating the dialectical
tensions of the period, the moderns often drew upon models that were distinctly nodal in
character, decentralized and interpenetrating, networked.

Some of these dialectical tensions stem from the ideological and epistemological failures
that shaped the lives of intellectuals and artists during the period. While a popular
understanding of evolution had prompted religious crises and anxieties about cultural
"devolution" during the latter 19th century, the dissemination of
Einstein’s theories of relativity and the emergence of a post-idealist version of the
discipline of anthropology, which had been forged in the hearth of colonial expansion,
turned anxieties about Western culture into an appreciation for global cultural diversity.
With the rise of relativistic thinking and the waning of scientific chauvinism,
philosophers and artists made the startling discovery that myth and history might be
simply two versions of human knowledge, rather than different degrees of epistemological
sophistication. Thus, modernists began to relinquish, and in fact critique, the status of
scientific progress and conventional chains of custody in recorded history as universally
supreme forms of knowledge; science might be one myth among many, used to interpret the
world around us.

In the modernist critique of Enlightenment epistemology, we begin to see artists attempt
to convey the human condition in spatial rather than chronological narrative structures.
For instance, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) experiments with
myth, stream-of-consciousness, and surrealism to deconstruct binaries like master/servant
and countryman/other in aid of articulating the increasingly visible connections between
classes, religions, sexualities, and national histories. A desire to conceive of human
knowledge as the result of synchronic webs of connectivity rather than one-way, linear
chains of cause and effect prompted Joyce and many others to search for new ways to
represent experience. These new representational strategies often reflected a sense of
societal fragmentation that is central to modernist aesthetics, and that is typically
understood to be balanced by a competing impulse toward totalization. But this dialectic,
fragment/totality, does not fully address the complexity of many modernist experiments in
form, which often involve dynamic interchanges that function more along the principle of
networks.

By focusing on the networked dynamics of these modernist experiments, we aim to
rearticulate the fragment/totality dialectic with a figuration that emphasizes mediations
and exchanges. Both in the form and the content of modernist narrative, this dynamism was
crucial to artists who were trying to think beyond the polarities of entropy and unity.
And while the logic of such networks operates differently from text to text, as these
articles begin to demonstrate, the shared project of networked aesthetics cannot be
ignored. In addition to articulating a common project of the moderns, one of the most
immediately profitable advantages of a networked reading of modernist narrative is that it
can offer resolution for the formal tensions of some of modernism’s most vexing texts, as
well as illuminate the model through which many moderns figured their rapidly changing
social environment.

While narrative is, of course, only one signal that the network was emerging as a
dominant figural model during the modern period, this collection focuses on modernist
narrative as a marker of the intellectual history of network thought. We find one example
of that ideational development in the rejection of the melting pot, the figural identity
of the nation that was being challenged in the 1910s and 20s in texts like Horace Kallen’s
"Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot" (1915), and Henry Pratt
Fairchild’s The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926). Randolph Bourne,
the public intellectual and vocal opponent of the U.S.’s entry into World War I, drew on
networked models in his new formulation of the nation. In "Trans-National America," published in July 1916 in response to the dissensus
brewing over intervention, Bourne pronounced the failure of the melting pot and offered a
new schema to replace the broken metaphor: a set of "national
clusters" connecting into a "federation of
cultures"
#bourne1916. This
"trans-nationality," he believed, could rectify the bitter divisions
created by the war, and he even suggested that it could be a model for conflict deterrent
in international diplomacy. In other words, the trans-national model of nodes and networks
could salvage some kind of coherent whole from the fragmentation that threatened to
shatter the nation and perhaps even human civilization – a complex reworking of social
space that mediated the dialectical tension of unity and dispersal that occupied so many
of the American moderns.

What we take away from "Trans-National America" is not
Bourne’s failure to position his "clusters" thesis as the immediate
figural successor to the melting pot, but his reliance on networked formulations to
resolve one of the most basic social and political concerns of the day.

Never does Bourne deploy the language of networks or connectivity as we recognize those
discourses today. But in the language of "clusters,"
"federation," and "trans-nationality," he theorizes
a framework that is, simply put, nodal – and one that is completely independent of the
technological developments that are now assumed to be the derivation of network thinking.
In locating Bourne as a key figure in modernist experiments with networks, we contend that
the moderns’ engagements with the network are not equivalent to today’s informational
networks, but that they established a discourse that has made today’s network society
articulable.

This cluster takes cues from what we consider to be Bourne’s proto-networking tropes and
terminology. His work performs two crucial functions: it represents the search (that we
find by modernists more generally) for alternatives to the received paradigms of fragment
vs. totality, center vs. periphery that organize much criticism, and it signals the need
for the digital humanities to account for more of its earlier cultural beneficiaries. Our
papers explicitly engage the nodal modalities present in the writing of modernists like
Bourne, and they perform a decentralized narrative of emerging networked thinking by
analyzing not only the tropes and individual texts but also the genre and historical
occasions of writing in the modernist period. This cluster seeks to offer the current
digital humanities an expanded archive for the conceptual evolution of its perhaps most
crucial concept: the network.

Molly Gage sees an early figuration of the modern network in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, a text that in Gage’s reading offers a
contemporary view of the "ambivalent future technology
promises." In groping toward that ambivalent future, Anderson’s characters and
plots form what can best be described by the kluge. The term, first defined
by J.W. Granholm in the February 1962 issue of Datamation as
an "ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a
distressing whole," provides a helpful analogue for analyzing the early
iterations of the network envisioned by modernists such as Sherwood Anderson. Admittedly,
while Winesburg Ohio is "seldom
considered a contribution to any modern comprehension of electronically inflected
networks," Gage argues that the characters in the text look for resolution of
technological divide not only to the "agrarian past in which
relationships were dependent on proximity and information was disseminated by
storytelling, but they also look to the specter of the future where relationships are
more arbitrary and excessive information is routed along the information
superhighway." Though it may not have been able to celebrate such information
excess and arbitrary connectivity, as does much of the network theory of contemporary
digital humanities, Anderson’s constellar vision of the technological horizon can offer
the field an expanded archive of early thought.

Gage’s deployment of the "kluge" to analyze Anderson does not simply perform a novel
reading of a canonical modernist text; it proposes that the text’s narrative form produced
the object that the later term would be able to articulate. Similarly, Wesley Beal
suggests that the resurgence of critical interest in the U.S.A. trilogy and the turn in the humanities toward network theory has not
been entirely coincidental. Though he admits that it "would be sloppy
to argue for a causal relationship….the correspondence between these two developments
raises important questions that could illuminate some of the trilogy’s formal
complexity, as well as deepen our understanding of the relationship between modernism
and networked discourses." Even further from a celebratory stance toward
dissolution of centralized power, and contrary to traditional readings of U.S.A. that discuss its formal properties in terms of dispersal
and the supposedly ruinous disconnections of modern life, the paper argues that the
interplay of these formal fragments results in a semiotic web that drives Dos Passos’s
narrative strategy toward a totalizing vision of the nation and, indeed, history. In fact,
in focusing on the machinic dynamics of Dos Passos’s form, the article establishes network
discourses as the organizing principle of several pre-digitization modes of production,
including Fordism and the modern corporation. Beal’s article thus defamiliarizes the
figure of the network by uncovering roots of the concept in grounds that would be
considered antithetical to today’s dominant ideological associations.

J.J. Butts offers a reading of the collective novel as a generic engagement with
networked aesthetics. Inextricable from modernist production, the collective novel is
itself an example of the moderns’ recognition of the politics of form, and it specifically
highlights an awareness of the power of networked connectivity – in other words, an
awareness of the politics of networks. Butts argues that the genre, identified by
Granville Hicks in the 1930s and associated with John Dos Passos, Albert Halper, and
Josephine Herbst, among others, offers a compelling example of modernist connectivity
narrative. Collective novels proliferate character plots and utilize documentary materials
to keep the focus on the social aggregate rather than individuals. These strategies make
such works particularly well-suited to exploring political geographies, so much so that
critics often situate the collective novel as the outgrowth of the proletarian literary
movement of the 1930s. But Butts contests this origin myth, arguing that the form instead
emerged as a response to broader modern contexts, namely metropolitan complexity and mass
culture. The paper examines the implications of these concerns for the form’s political
efficacy. In other words, while expanding the spatial the nature of the networked
community from Anderson’s relatively confined locus, Butts also recognizes the centrality
of the politics of the network as an important marker of the development of the network
narrative genre in the modern period. The inherently political nature of this model,
relatively unacknowledged in discussion of contemporary outgrowths of the genre, situates
a distinctly modern voice to networked figuration that is invested in the politics of
form. Butts therefore illuminates yet another archive of the moderns’ early network
experimentation – one that is often associated with the sociological connectivity of the
digital age, but that in fact originates in the modernist milieu.

While Butts focuses on the politics of form through narratives that collectivize
individuals, Stacy Lavin accesses a modernist proto-network theory in a memoir form that
individualizes the nodal, occasional, and easily invertible global politics of late World
War II. This paper shows how Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have
Seen (1945) deconstructs the ways of "seeing" characteristic
of global connectivity in "the 19th century" – namely evolution
and romantic nationalism – by aligning her plays on memoir conventions with the military,
scientific, and technological aspects of the episteme. And it highlights moments where
Stein anticipates, through formal experiment and reflective exposition, the psychological,
political, and cultural dynamics embedded in emergent networks of information and
international relations. In Wars I Have Seen, Lavin sees
another important addition to the archive of the digital humanities for its attention to
dynamics that have since appeared more thoroughly articulated in not only late 20th- and
early 21st-century network narrative but also in strains of network theory that have been
crucial to the expansion of the digital humanities in the past 20-30 years.

Notes

[1]David Bordwell’s The Way
Hollywood Tells It (2006) makes an (albeit oversimplified) attempt to identify
this facet of the genre as "offbeat storytelling" according to the
profusion of six-degrees film structures such as Robert Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts.

[2]David Ciccoricco’s Reading Network
Fiction (2007) distinguishes a strain of the genre in the digital age,
identifying network fiction as a mode of narration that "makes use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and
recombinatory narratives" in such works as Michael Joyce’s Twilight, A Symphony (1996).